Oyston speaks out on eve of season

Blackpool FC chairman Karl Oyston has admitted that relations with a lot of the Seasiders’ fans may never be repaired - but he insisted he was going nowhere and would resist calls to leave.

Speaking on the eve of the season, Oyston also gave a less than coded message that Blackpool would not spend their way out of the bottom division after the ignominy of relegation to League Two.

Oyston’s comments come on the eve of the new season which opens on Saturday with a home match against Exeter City and after his father Owen offered an olive branch to disaffected supporters, angry at the way the club has been run.

And Karl Oyston also stated that he had questioned his decision to remain quiet and refuse to speak to some sections of the media.

He said: “I think being silent for a couple not years hasn’t served the club’s interest as well as I thought it might.

“But I would never walk away in the face of the type of behaviour that has been heaped on me in the past two years.

“The way to go is not that way.

“Certainly, I will not be driven away from a club where I have spent many, many years building,.”

He said seeing the club drop to League Two had been an ‘awful’ experience.

He continued: “As a business it is a good solid, resilient and successful business and it will stay that way.”

Karl Oyston defended the decision to take some fans to court for making disparaging comments on-line and elsewhere.

He said: “Most supporters that I have spoken to and are in any way reasonably minded, if you showed them and explained what has been said, what has been done, what’s happened, and asked when what you would do if it was aimed at your family, your wife or your daughter or son or mother or father or colleague or one of the players, what would you do?

“Everyone would answer in the same way and they do exactly what we did.”

Asked if he would stop taking legal action against fans, he said: “There are very few (outstanding court cases).

“We have committed in dialogue with our supporters’ group not to take any action.

“We could have taken a lot more - we haven’t.

“We have said we will call a truce.”

Asked about the state of the club’s finances, Oyston said in a Granada TV interview: “There is plenty of cash within the club.

“It (the figure) is in the accounts, the cash reserves. I think it is about £10 million this year.”

He said he would not commit to saying that money was available for transfers, explaining: “Every agent and our manager would be rubbing their hands with glee and everybody will think we will have a big spending spree.

“I think we are in a far, far stronger position than we were the last time we were in League Two.

“The ground is better, the business is better.

“The support base is obviously fractured - a lot of work needs to take place, predominately by us to repair as much of that which it is possible to repair and accept the fact that a lot of it is not possible to repair, but we have built from a low base before and I am sure we can build from a low base again and go back up the leagues and do it in a sustainable responsible way.”